“We have observed the early antipathy mutually entertained by the Scottish Presbyterians and the House of Stuart. It seems to have glowed in the breast even of the good-natured Charles II. He might have remembered that, in 1651, the Presbyterians had fought, bled, and ruined themselves in his cause. But he rather recollected their early faults than their late repentance; and even their services were combined with the recollection of the absurd and humiliating circumstances of personal degradation,[23] to which their pride had subjected him, while they professed to espouse his cause. As a man of pleasure, he hated their stern inflexible rigour, which stigmatized follies even more deeply than crimes; and he whispered to his confidants, that, ‘therefore, it was not wonderful that, in the first year of his restoration, he formally re-established prelacy in Scotland.’ But it is surprising that, with his father’s example before his eyes, he should not have been satisfied to leave at freedom the consciences of those who could not reconcile themselves to the new system. The religious opinions of sectaries have a tendency, like the water of some springs, to become soft and mild when freely exposed to open day. Who can recognise, in the decent and industrious Quakers and Anabaptists, the wild and ferocious tenets which distinguished their sects while yet they were honoured with the distinction of the scourge and the pillory? Had the system of coercion against the Presbyterians been continued until our day, Blair and Robertson would have preached in the wilderness, and only discovered their powers of eloquence and composition, by rolling along a deeper torrent of gloomy fanaticism. “The western counties distinguished themselves by their opposition to the prelatic system. Three hundred and fifty ministers, ejected from their churches and livings, wandered through the mountains, sowing the seeds of covenanted doctrine, while multitudes of fanatical followers pursued them, to reap the forbidden crop. These Conventicles, as they were called, were denounced by the law, and their frequenters dispersed by military force. The genius of the persecuted became stubborn, obstinate, and ferocious; and, although Indulgences were tardily granted to some Presbyterian ministers, few of the true Covenanters, or Whigs, as they were called, would condescend to compound with a prelatic government, or to listen even to their own favourite doctrine under the auspices of the King. From Richard Cameron, their apostle, this rigid sect acquired the name of Cameronians. They preached and prayed against the Indulgence, and against the Presbyterians who availed themselves of it, because their accepting of this royal boon was a tacit acknowledgment of the King’s supremacy in ecclesiastical matters.